Alternatives
Products that do what We built a <60ms, open-source alternative to E2B using RustVMM and KVM does
Over the past few months, as we scaled our internal AI Agents, we hit a dead end: Running LLM-generated arbitrary code in Docker is basically running naked on security due to container escape risks. But using full traditional VMs takes minutes to boot and eats too much memory to support high-density concurrency. We loved the developer experience of SaaS sandboxes on the market, but they are closed-source, expensive, and have too high a barrier to entry for self-hosting. So, our team decided to build our own. After months of grinding, using RustVMM and KVM, we built a blazing-fast,…
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2020 · github.com
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- 4LV
Hello HN! We've been working on a new hypervisor https://kwarantine.xyz that can run strongly isolated containers. This is still a WIP, but we wanted to give the community an idea about our approach, its benefits, and various use cases it unlocks. Today, VMs are used to host containers, and make up for the lack of strong security as well as kernel isolation in containers. This work adds this missing security piece in containers. We plan on launching a free private beta soon. Meanwhile, we'd deeply appreciate any feedback, and happy to answer any questions here or on our slack…
2021
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Hi, over the past few months I've been working on this project: Numax is a small Rust runtime that does three things: it runs WebAssembly modules in a sandbox, has a built-in local key-value store, and syncs everything across nodes with CRDTs and gossip. Basically, you write a wasm module, run it on two machines, and they converge (I hope !). It's a decentralized system... I hope someone finds it interesting! There's a whitepaper I've put a lot into, and I think the code isn't bad either! I believe there's still room in this world for software that's fun and well made, and while building…
Jun 2026 · github.com
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We have built Tarit as a hypervisor built from ground up for running AI agent and RL environments. It is based on rust-vmm and can be used as a replacement for firecracker. Firecracker was built to serve a different need of primarily serverless compute and hence does not have primitives like live snapshots without pausing the VM operations. We also provide a basic orchestrator that handles placement of the microVMs, creating clusters with HA, maintaining a warm pool of VMs, and takes care of setting up networking and monitoring. Our benchmarks on a metal instance shows an acquire VM from…
Jul 2026 · github.com
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I spent the past few weeks making an open source cloud code editing environment with an AI copilot and multiplayer collaboration! It's fully self-hostable in 5-10 minutes. There's a lot of minor improvements to be made, and some are already listed in the Github issues. Let me know what you think and feel free to try it out.
2024 · github.com
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2020 · github.com
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2020 · secondstate.io
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2021 · tensorbase.io
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Hey HN, I'm Daniel, solo dev from Germany. I built ClawHosters (https://clawhosters.com), a managed hosting platform for OpenClaw, the open-source AI agent framework. Quick timeline: domain registered February 5th. First paying customer six days later. I probably should have spent more time on it, but it works. If you haven't seen OpenClaw, it lets you run a personal AI assistant that connects to Telegram, Discord, Slack, and WhatsApp. Self-hosting it is absolutely possible, but it's a pain. You're dealing with Docker setup, SSL certs, port forwarding, security hardening, keeping…
Feb 2026 · clawhosters.com
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Jun 2026 · github.com
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Hi HN, I’m the creator of Cordum. I’ve been working in DevOps and infrastructure for years (currently in the fintech/security space), and as I started playing with AI agents, I noticed a scary pattern. Most "safety" mechanisms rely on system prompts ("Please don't do X") or flimsy Python logic inside the agent itself. If we treat agents as autonomous employees, giving them root access and hoping they listen to instructions felt insane to me. I wanted a way to enforce hard constraints that the LLM cannot override, no matter how "jailbroken" it gets. So I built Cordum. It’s an open-source…
Jan 2026 · github.com
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Democratisation of local AI is key. I've been working on pushing the limits of commercial hardware, squeezing any extra bit possible. My Scientific Agentic AI hareness helped me to reallocate every single bit of it. I rewrote the Kernel, I went down the CUDA rabbit hole until I have been able to explain any bit and any ms of computational power involved in the process pushing the Qwen 30B-A3B from 8 tok7s to 19 tok/s with llama.cpp up to 22.2 tok/s with my project and 109 tok/s on not novel content and speeding up the prefill by 5-9X
Jul 2026 · github.com
- 15IB
Link: https://docs.trysoma.ai/ For the past ~9 months I’ve been building Soma, an open-source AI agent & workflow runtime written in Rust, with a TypeScript SDK (Python coming soon). It’s not a framework; it’s meant to sit underneath whatever agent/tooling code you already write (Vercel AI SDK, LangChain, custom code, etc.). It provides features around your framework + a better DX for building agents. I’ve tried to take a Next.JS model: open-source, good DX, self-deployable. I originally set out to build a vertical back-office/operations product for SMEs. I needed a…
Dec 2025 · docs.trysoma.ai
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Hi everyone, I'm Vasek (https://x.com/mlejva), the CEO of the company behind this - https://e2b.dev. The company is called E2B. We're an open-source (https://github.com/e2b-dev) devtool that makes it easy to run untrusted AI-generated code in our secure sandboxes. You can think of us as coding runtime for LLMs. You can self host us on GCP (https://github.com/e2b-dev/infra/blob/main/self-host.md) and we're working on AWS, then Azure, and any Linux machine. This repo is one of our open-source projects that we're…
2025 · github.com
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Hi HN, I’m one of the devs behind StarDesk, a P2P-first remote desktop we’ve been building for ~1 year. We started this partly out of frustration: some popular RDP tools haven’t seen meaningful updates in a long time, and long-standing issues are often left unaddressed. As devs, we really dislike software that stagnates once it “works well enough”. StarDesk is our attempt to do it differently. What we focus on: -P2P by default (relay as fallback) -Low RTT + low jitter > chasing max bitrate -Encoder / input path tuned for real-time interaction -Modern E2EE (TLS/DTLS) UX-wise, setup…
Jan 2026 · stardesk.net
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Hey HN! For that last 8 months I've been trying to make agents that can hack web applications to find vulnerabilities in them - An AI Security Tester. The system has 29 agents in total, a custom LLM Orchestration framework which works on the task-subtask architecture (old-school but works amazingly for my use case, and is pretty reliable) with custom agent calling mechanism. No Auo-Gen, Langchain and Crew AI - Everything custom built for pentesting. Each test runs in an isolated Kali linux environment (on AWS Fargate), where the agents have full access to the environment to undertake any…
2025
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Hey HN, I built Superserve, a compute layer that lets AI agents live inside isolated Firecracker microVMs with no session time limits. The problem I kept running into: most sandbox providers kill your agent after 24 hours. If you're running something autonomous that needs to work for days — refactoring a codebase, running tests in a loop — you're constantly fighting timeouts and rebuilding state. Superserve lets you snapshot a running VM at any point, fork it into parallel branches, and resume exactly where you left off. Each agent gets its own VM, no shared kernels. There's also a…
Jul 2026 · superserve.ai
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Hi HN folks, I have been building AI agents for quite some time now. The shift has gone from LLM + Tools → LLM Workflows → Agent + Tools + Memory, and now we are finally seeing true agency emerge: agents as systems composed of tools, command-line access, fine-grained system capabilities, and memory. This way of building agents is powerful, and I believe it is here to stay. But the real question is: are the systems powering these agents ready for that future? I do not think so. Using Docker for a single agent is not going to scale well, because agents need to be lightweight and fast. LLMs…
Mar 2026 · github.com
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2025 · github.com
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Hey Hacker News, For the last 2 months, I've been working on a testing agent to free developers from the endless maintenance of end-to-end tests. You just push up a PR, and our agent analyzes the code changes and automatically visits the preview to test things out like a real human! We also support describing tests in English (or even in the PR description), and we'll go through your site whenever you want via a GitHub action to test and make sure various core flows continue to work as expected. We are looking for early testers and are giving out a generous free tier! Just sign up on the…
2025 · playmatic.ai
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Hi HN, my name is Maria, and I’m a co-founder of Maritime. We started Maritime at MIT to build infrastructure for companies that need to run thousands of isolated AI agents for their customers. Imagine you set up an agent like OpenClaw, or a personal assistant agent with a custom framework, and want to give a separate version of it to every customer/friend. Each customer needs their own agent running in an isolated microVM, with persistent state, secrets, triggers, and sleep/wake behavior. Building such scalable and secure infra will take you months and will cost hundreds of…
18d ago · maritime.sh
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Hello Hacker News, I often hear people saying "all build-systems suck", an opinion I have been sharing for years, and this is the motivation for this project. I finally got the opportunity to make it open-source, and here it is. In a few words, it is like make, except it can be comfortably used even in big projects using HPC (with millions of jobs, thousands of them running in parallel). The major differences are that: - dependencies are automatically tracked (no need to call gcc -M and the like, no need to be tailored to any specific tool, it just works) by spying disk activity - it is…
2025 · github.com
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